Last month, the NBC sitcom The Good Place returned for its second year after a first season that was widely praised as “surreal and high-concept” and “ambitious and uniquely satisfying.” In the two-part pilot, the show introduced a woman named Eleanor (Kristen Bell) who dies and finds herself in a non-denominational heaven by mistake—and who decides to learn how to become a better person in order to earn her spot in the afterlife. With that premise, The Good Place revealed what would eventually become the show’s most important theme: ethics. To avoid being sent to The Bad Place, Eleanor enlists her assigned “soul mate,” a former professor of moral philosophy named Chidi (William Jackson Harper), to teach her how to change her selfish ways.

Many TV critics have acknowledged the show’s unconventional embrace of ethics. But few have delved into what makes The Good Place’s depiction of the discipline so refreshing, yet effective, as both comedy and an informal educational tool. As a bioethicist who teaches a class on ethics and pop culture at Fordham University, I’ve integrated clips from the series into my lectures for a few reasons. While other shows have discussed moral principles, The Good Place stands out for dramatizing actual ethics classes onscreen, without watering down the concepts being described, and while still managing to be entertaining. By spending multiple episodes building on the subject, the sitcom offers a thoughtful and humorous survey of a wide range of concepts that rarely get explored before a mainstream audience.

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Most episodes in Season 1 feature, at some point, Chidi rolling out a chalkboard. He breaks down complex ethical frameworks for Eleanor, gives her reading assignments about Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and Thomas Scanlon’s book on contractualism, What We Owe to Each Other, and encourages her to take the needs of others, instead of just her own, into account. Fortunately, the show has only grown more confident in Season 2. After the twist in the Season 1 finale—where Eleanor and Chidi find out they’re actually in a version of The Bad Place cleverly designed by the celestial architect, Michael (Ted Danson)—it seemed like the ethics lessons might wane, if not stop altogether.

In fact, the opposite happened, and Chidi finds himself with a new student: Michael, the immortal demon whose goal is to find creative ways to torture “bad” souls, but who claims he now wants to help his victims get into the real Good Place. The newest episode, which aired Thursday, may be the most revealing example yet of how The Good Place keeps deepening the way ethics gets portrayed in pop culture. Despite its emphasis on morality, The Good Place waited until its second year to even address the most famous, and perhaps overused, thought experiment in the field: the trolley problem.

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You don’t have to be an ethicist to have heard of the following hypothetical conundrum: You’re riding a trolley that’s barreling toward five people on the tracks. Doing nothing will result in their deaths. Alternatively, you could pull a lever, diverting the vehicle to another set of tracks, killing one person instead of five. What do you do? As Lauren Cassani Davis wrote for The Atlantic in 2015, “Puzzling, ridiculous, and oddly irresistible, this imaginary scenario has profoundly shaped our understanding of right and wrong” over the last 40 years.

It’s no surprise the trolley problem has become a fixture in ethics intro classes. The experiment helps newcomers to the field examine two important ethical theories: utilitarianism (taking the action that results in the greatest amount of good for the largest number of people) and deontology (trying to do as much good as possible, though the actions you take to get there matter more than the actual results). But the trolley problem and itsspinoffs work on a more intuitive level; they don’t require you to dig into more abstract concepts like what it actually means to do the “most good” or weighing “intrinsic versus instrumental” value.

Netflix is particularly fond of the trolley experiment, which was featured in the most recent seasons of two of its original shows this past summer. In the penultimate episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s third season, the protagonist Kimmy takes a college philosophy class, learns about the trolley problem, and becomes obsessed with utilitarianism. Similarly, in a Season 5 episode of Orange Is the New Black—not so subtly titled “Tied to the Tracks”—a character uses the trolley problem to explain the “classic deontological dilemma” of whether to sacrifice one woman for the greater good.

The episode allows the experiment to surface in multiple forms; there is, it suggests, no single correct answer.

Where other shows’ direct discussion of ethics might begin and end with the trolley problem, The Good Place notably refrained from using this pedagogical crutch for the entire first season. After the finale aired, Maureen Ryan at Variety suggested that the show’s first 13 episodes comprise an extended exploration of the thought experiment. This may be an oversimplification of the series, but Ryan’s observation demonstrates how the dilemma has become virtually synonymous with ethics as a whole.

In Thursday’s episode, “The Trolley Problem,” The Good Place finally did tackle the famous scenario. As usual, Chidi is at a blackboard explaining the experiment to his students, citing the work of the philosopher Philippa Foot, along with a few variations. Less predictably, Michael later transports Eleanor and Chidi onto an actual trolley careening toward humans on the tracks to see how Chidi would react in real time. At another point, Michael takes the duo on a trip to an operating theater, where Chidi lives out the so-called “transplant thought experiment” (in which a doctor has to determine whether to kill one person—in this case, Eleanor—in order to use her organs to save the lives of five other people). Michael insists the aim of these simulations is to help him relate to humans’ ethical decision-making, but Eleanor realizes he’s just manipulating Chidi, finding new ways to torture him.

“The Trolley Problem” allows the experiment to surface in multiple forms, helpfully reinforcing the notion that there is, in fact, no single correct answer, and many ways of thinking through the question. The episode starts with the classroom scene, complete with a model trolley, before literalizing the experiment and making Chidi steer an actual trolley to hilariously bloody effect. But the episode references the problem in more subtle ways, too. In true Good Place fashion, a split-second visual gag during a real-trolley scene involves a movie marquee that reads “Strangers Under a Train” and “Bend It Like Bentham.” Eventually, Chidi is faced with another conflict: After learning Michael might not really care about ethics, Chidi realizes he’ll be tortured whatever decision he makes. He can continue to teach Michael and keep participating in distressing scenarios, or refuse and be sent to the real Bad Place. Chidi ultimately chooses to suffer at Michael’s hand rather than select that outcome himself—essentially deciding not to take action and pull the metaphorical trolley lever.

While the trolley experiment isn’t novel or inherently funny, it would be unthinkable for a show like The Good Place to ignore it completely. So the episode opts to squeeze the basics of the dilemma into a two-minute cold open padded with some jokes about Michael’s total lack of humanity (by way of a solution, he proposes an elaborate method to kill everyone on the tracks). In fact, “The Trolley Problem” gets plenty of comedic mileage out of Michael’s obtuseness. In an assigned essay about the ethics of Les Misérables, Michael rambles about how everyone in the novel is terrible, and that he knows Victor Hugo ends up in The Bad Place, like most French people do. With Michael playing the role of a more depraved Eleanor from Season 1, Chidi doubles down on his beleaguered, nerdy professor persona, forcing Michael to repeatedly scrawl “People=Good,” Bart Simpson-style, on the chalkboard. Early on, Eleanor mocks Chidi for writing a Hamilton-esque rap musical about the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard to teach in class (“My name is Kierkegaard, and my writing is impeccable / check out my teleological suspension of the ethical”).

Much of what makes The Good Place’s lessons so realistic is the interplay between a completely inexperienced student and a teacher who has devoted his life to the discipline. Chidi attempts to break down difficult concepts into morsels Eleanor and her classmates can wrap their heads around, prompting responses the audience may find relatable. The show’s creator, Michael Schur, told me he envisioned Eleanor as a stand-in for viewers, who can process these new ideas alongside her. Schur even drew on his own experience when crafting Eleanor’s initial reaction to learning about utilitarianism in Season 1. She’s immediately satisfied by the approach, questioning why anyone would bother with the other theories—something my students tend to think as well.

The Good Place’s focus on ethics wouldn’t mean as much if it weren’t also remarkable in other ways.

A sitcom may seem like an unlikely vehicle for serious discussions about moral philosophy, which viewers might expect to find in medical and legal dramas (albeit in less literal, didactic forms). But the subject and medium are surprisingly compatible. A comedy can broach otherwise tedious-sounding ideas with levity and self-awareness, and has more leeway to use contrived or exaggerated scenarios to bring concepts to life (like showing Chidi’s terror at repeatedly allowing the trolley to kill someone on the tracks, spraying their blood in his face and mouth). In The Good Place, the classroom scenes are not there to be preachy; they’re plot devices, sandwiched between jokes. When Chidi is discussing Aristotle in Season 1, Eleanor asks facetiously, “Who died and left Aristotle in charge of ethics?” “Plato!” a frustrated Chidi yells, pointing to the philosophy family tree on the board behind him.

There are practical upsides to a well-crafted, ethically curious show like The Good Place being on network TV. As The Atlantic’s Julie Beck pointed out last December, morality has become a justification fueling seemingly intractable divides between groups—a dynamic that’s especially visible in today’s polarized American political climate. Part of the appeal of “ethics classroom” episodes may be that people are interested in getting back to basics, to try and figure out how others think and reach decisions that may be very different from their own.

In this light, bringing digestible ethics lessons to the masses can be seen as a moral act, ensuring that those who don’t spend hours poring over Kant and Judith Jarvis Thomson are also privy to what’s gained from understanding how people think. If consuming the works of moral philosophers were the key to living a good life, “then the only nice, thoughtful people would be these hermitic, obsessive readers,” The Good Place’s Kristen Bell told me. “We can’t have that—we have to make it accessible. If you’re making people laugh while you’re teaching them, it’s the best way to do it.”

Indeed, The Good Place’s focus on ethics wouldn’t mean as much if it weren’t also remarkable in other ways—the performances, the top-notch writing, the wordplay and pun-laden jokes, the willingness to formally experiment with the sitcom genre. “I don’t expect or necessarily even believe that the average person is as interested in [ethics] as I am,” Schur told me. “While we’re discussing the issues that I want to discuss, I also know that I have a responsibility to the audience to tell a story. The goal is not to change the world; the goal of this is to make a high-quality, entertaining show that has good-quality acting.” On that front, Season 2 has certainly succeeded—but Schur still promised I’ll have plenty of new clips to show my students this semester.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”